Tom Grennan is the rebel with a cause - interview

Tom Grennan doesn’t sit still. He leans back in his chair, fidgets with splinters on the wooden table outside the pub, and glares at a fresh tattoo on his left forearm, which looks a bit sore.

“That’s f**ked isn’t it?” he says, peering at the red and black ink. “I was at a festival celebrating my birthday and I was drunk, obviously. What happens if it gets infected?” He listens intently, then baulks at the suggestion he might need to get it checked out. “F**king hell, don’t tell me that. Oh my gosh. F**king hell mate.”

The 23-year-old, Bedford-born singer songwriter has been well on his way for a while. Aged 18, caught in “the wrong place at the wrong time”, he was attacked by a gang of strangers and found himself, recovering with four metal plates in his jaw, writing about how he felt and putting it to music.

Cue his debut EP Something In The Water, released in 2016, and a follow-up, Release The Breaks, which dropped last year. He featured on The Independent’s Ones to Watch list that December, and went on to perform on Later...With Jools Holland and the Radio 1 Live Lounge, sparking a bigger jump to mainstream attention when he featured on the Chase and Status track “When It All Goes Wrong”.

Grennan is now ready to drop his debut album Lighting Matches, following a sold-out show at Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London… and ahead of a massive headline gig at Brixton Academy. He’s also doing a Guinness World Record (because why not?) attempt for the most live concerts in 12 hours – starting on 11 July in Manchester and travelling across to Marlborough for 10 shows.

He's a sound lad, with an easy confidence and a magpie's eye for fashion - at the NME awards this year he looked like a Spanish matador, resplendent in silk black trousers and a red sequinned jacket - who seems to get on with everyone, counting the likes of Elton John and The Libertines' Carl Barat as friends/fans. And while he's had a few hiccups on the way here, he's managed to circumnavigate the murky waters of the music industry with relative ease; keeping his eyes fixed firmly ahead, doing things his own way, and racking up a dedicated legion of young fans who adore his no-bulls**t attitude to music, and to life.

Lighting Matches boasts tracks like “Barbed Wire”, an early version of which he performed for The Independent’s Music Box sessions last year, and now has a circus style, swing band addition. There's a gorgeous, stripped-down piano ballad called "Lucky Ones" which makes the most of Grennan's powerful, vocals.

Its title track may surprise fans used to the swaggering attitude of this young singer-songwriter: it shows him to be just as adept at penning those more reflective, sombre tracks as he is at the brash, catchy ones.

“I chose that song because it’s a subtle song, it’s reflective, and it’s not the biggest song on the record but it is a great one,” he says now. “The title for the album came last minute, like the song did, but the title is still me, it sounds like…” he grins. “I like causing trouble.”

open image in gallery

He calls Eg White, one of the producers he worked with for Lighting Matches, “a pixie" – "he dances around the studio, hits all the drums, and basically gets really immersed in what we’re doing," he explains. "I was the one who got distracted!” And he didn’t listen to anyone else’s music while he was working on material for this album: “I don’t want to sound like anyone else, I wanted to be in my own creative space and find this river of melody myself.”

“My A&R is amazing,” he adds. “When I sent a song over to him, he’d be like ‘that’s the one Eg White could produce’… We wanted ‘Sober’ for Fraser [T Smith] because we knew he’d take it to a completely different place from where the demo started out.”

Grennan thinks there’s a lot of good music around (he loves the new A$AP Rocky album), but wonders if there’s so much that fans feel overloaded by it all – “you get lost in it and you don’t take the time to get involved with an artist and relate to it," he says, glancing down at his tattoo again and giving it a tentative prod. “F**k.”

His own experience of the music industry has been largely positive, but he’s not become so complacent that he feels as though he can relax. “I’m enjoying it,” he says, “but I’m still f**king grateful for it all, because I fell into it, and a lot of my friends in music are still struggling, trying to get signed, you know?

“I tried my hardest for that too, but I feel like I haven’t had a 10 year battle, so I’m so grateful to be in the position that I’m in. But it’s not gonna go away anytime soon because I’m gonna work my hardest, keep battling and keep causing trouble, innit..." He pauses, then adds: “I think a lot of people think you’ve made it when you sign, but that’s when the hard work starts. But it’s all been mad enjoyable seeing fans grow.

"Seeing them all on Twitter, see it happening at shows, audiences getting bigger. I can’t believe I’m doing Brixton. But it’s all happened organically, that’s why I love it. I’ve never been a beggar, and I don’t think I’ve begged it at all.”

For the album itself, Grennan just wants it to stick around. “For it to sit with people, and for them to revisit it,” he says. “I don’t think this is an album that gets boring. This has been the longest wait of my life, and really, I just wanna get it out, get to work and get it into everyone’s houses. Mums, dads, kids, grandparents…” He grins again. “Wait until Friday, mate, I’m just gonna be sat in the pub handing it out to people passing by."

Lighting Matches, the debut album from Tom Grennan, is out on 6 July